itch.io

I like this but it's got some problems -- mostly AI-UI trouble.  I really like the simple graphics, but they're a little *too* simple; some buildings look very similar and most do not show what they do.  All features and type are too small for me and there's no way to resize.  Fixed-size, immovable report windows are a big UX drag, and they use too much space for what they're showing.

The goals are helpful for figuring out what to do next (and what you *can* do next) but sometimes leave you in the dark -- like when it told me I needed to grow tobacco there was still no Tobacco Plantation available to build and no way to find out what its requirements were.  Eventually I caused something to happen so it showed up... but I still don't know what that was.

I got up to a decent population and then happiness started dropping.  It turned out the citizens wanted cloth, which I had built two workshops for but those only had one worker each because the houses had all evolved to Settler and I didn't have enough Pioneers anymore.  The auto-levelling housing is not a good idea -- it makes sense to build housing and then intentionally improve it; choosing to *prevent* it from improving -- and trying to build out enough total while blocking improvements on the right amount -- requires inside-out thinking.

Using warehouses as the outposts for territory expansion is sort of arbitrary and non-logical.  If you're doing the sort of ruleset where territory is expanded by buildings, why wouldn't *all* buildings expand your territory?  And then if all buildings do it, why bother about territory?  Is there some game-economic benefit to restricting area that way?  Or is it just a gratuitous constraint?

I couldn't find any information about the different terrains, so when Tobacco wouldn't build on the dark green inside my territory I had to guess that it might build on the light green, and then warehouse out to that.  It worked!  But I didn't need that warehouse.

And more or less finally, I didn't get any real sense of the citizens.  It didn't seem like they were eating the food I was producing, and sometimes I hear they need more cloth or something but I don't know what they're doing with it.  The citizens are just sort of a field-effect around all these buildings I'm putting down.

This is the kind of trouble that comes from AI-built systems.  If you're a person building a game then you have ideas about little digital citizens and what they're like and what they're doing, and your idea starts from there and then elaborates the infrastructure and institutions around them.  Your feeling about that is the idea that makes Civ III different from Populous or Warcraft.  An AI "thinks" that a colonization game is like making resource buildings so here's a pattern of that, with no idea.

Just took a look again since the graphics update.  I have to say, I could be the only person in the world to think this but I liked the look *much* better before.  The new look is hard to read -- zoom out and the roads go invisible, zoom in and the background goes blurry -- and adds distraction instead of information.  The old look had a few problems, like sprites going under labels, but it was clear about roads and coastlines and everything that matters.  I don't need it to be hobbity and ochre for "immersion" -- that part is in my headbrain.  But as I say, could be just me.

Yeah -- it would be unrealistic to try to make this more realistic.  That being the case all you can do is make design decisions, and the ones you've made are perfectly valid.  So, cool!  It's a funny piece of work, and different from all the rest.

I like its crudity and simplicity but the red guy  always comes around and gets me and I have no reason to think there's anything I can do to save myself.

Oh yeah -- and CAN'T FIND ANY WAY TO QUIT!  I have to kill the process to make it go away.

Huh -- expertise!  I have a lot of opinions.

Played the download version and found it easier to work.  I was still usually lost though and never could find features that I know are supposed to be there.  One thing happened in both plays that seemed weird: Fairly early I came (I think) to a hadron tree; shook it... and was then surrounded not by protons and neutrons but by He nuclei (as I recall...).  That points to a bigger issue, that this is a game about particle physics without any physics.  I acknowledge that mixing "realistic" scales and velocities and whatnot would be... tricky... and modeling interactions in this particle menagerie would be crazy.  Just the same, it seems odd that electrons are wandering around among all these bare nuclei without organizing, and collecting loose individual quarks is *opposite* physics.  I don't know what you do about this.

Another way to put it is that I've spent a couple hours with this, amassed maybe 180 types -- so just scratched the surface -- and my relationship to pions is the same as it's always been: I've heard of pions but don't know what the point of them is.  What you've got here is attractive and partly great -- a game with a nuclides chart! -- and partly misses.  From the point I've gotten to it would be hard for me to learn any more because I can't really do anything on purpose with my inventory, which itself has been collected mostly at random.  Crafting is fun, but I've got 56 recipes (and where did I get them from again...?  Are there more?), have done 40, and don't know how to get the pieces for the others.  It would be dumb to shoehorn a quests mechanism or anything like that into this, but maybe a bit more causality would help organize the experience.

Same problem.

Seems interesting but can't play it as the UI is bollixed up; messages partly offscreen.  Screenshot from the tutorial.  What is the drill?  The stack of chevrons pointing up?

The concept of "game" there does not work.  Under "Gather" you can hunt, farm or mine, but mining doesn't work (I did buy the license for that so it should).  You have to make a substantial investment to farm but it never makes sense to do that instead of hunting.  Under "Empire" there are three things to purchase plus hire laborers; once you've bought them there is nothing more to do there.  Under "Market" the one thing that makes sense is to sell meat in winter.  The two things uner "Industrial" are both supposedly "under development" but your last update was 75 days ago -- and it's not like this is super-complex development.  But hey -- what does work is "VIP Bank" where we can go to PayPal and... give you money for more gold?  Why?  At this point the only thing I can do with my gold is buy more warehouse space or hire infinite peons to hunt for me.

How is that a game?  It's not even a thing.  This is a partly functional HTML form.  You should take it down.

Cool -- if you get it playable I'll probably play it a lot!

There seemed to be a lot of scrumble around horses, inventory and capacity.  I thought I had figured out the mounting business but had a horse disappear when I unmounted it.  When I bought a cart it threw my pack away -- why would I do that?  Also in the trading screen if you select one of the greater numbers like 10 and want to hit it four times because the quest wants 40, it pops back to 1 every time you hit Buy -- leading to confusion and odd numbers.

This seems potentially great but suffers badly from vibe coding.  I bought two horses; tutorial wants me to buy a horse and doesn't recognize that I've done that; I can't buy another horse because I'm a peon; I sell one horse and buy it back (at a loss); the tutorial is satisfied but my rebought horse never shows up again.  Many things like that.  Bad case of AI UI -- menus full of information but not rationally designed; flow from one choice to another or going back all messed up.

Could be great.  Hope someone makes it so.

There's nothing here.  There's three things you can do, but you can't do one.  What does work is the link to PayPal for the pay-to-play.

Inexplicable AI slop.  "Optimize your workflow"?  There is one thing to do: buy washing machines.  If you've always wanted more games about buying washing machines you're in luck.

This seems like a cool idea but I can't manage to really get what's going on or how to do things on purpose.  Competent steering is hard (for me anyway).  Found and activated a synchrotron but couldn't figure out how to work it; seemed like I needed more inventory so I drove off collecting... but then I couldn't bring up the synchrotron anymore... did I need to be at it to work it?  Went looking for it but couldn't find it again.  Engaging landscape but I didn't get any sensation of compass direction or where things were relative to each other; I have no idea what path I've driven or what shape the world is or whether I could just drive straight indefinitely and eventually find everything.  Found a shrine to Higgs; liked that idea.  F and TAB sometimes did things and sometimes didn't; sometimes I could jump and other times not; what other controls are there?  Couldn't tell.  Got into a couple of dialogs/views that were hard to get back out of.  Many different things happen and I can't tell which are phenomena and which are bugs.  Liked the particle info cards.  Everything suffers from that attractive-but-tiny text that seems to go with a lot of vibe-coded games these days.  

Seems really interesting!  Just needs better control (and information about controls).  My two star rating is not bad -- three is my "perfectly okay game" and five hardly ever happens.  I think most of my twos are something like "idea, but underdone", and the idea here seems good enough to be worth the effort of sorting it out.

Oh oh oh... I get you now.  Well let me get reorientated here...

So like the start menu has a Play Tutorial option... but it doesn't do anything; just goes back to the start.  The inactive tabs in the nav bar (like Tech) are so dim they're invisible.  There's (apparently) no Next Unit button.  I had one warrior (?) unit start in the water.  Why are the hex tiles overlapping instead of adjoining?  Repeated terrain icons (and all the hex borders) clutter the map and make it hard to read.  Just a lot of things that give the impression that you have not actually gone through and played the thing yourself from beginning to end and tested all the controls.  Instead, maybe you just let a bot whip it up for you and decided it was done -- I don't know.

Hey -- Well, there it is; all the comments I've got are above. I don't have any deeper comments because the UI difficulties keep me from getting anywhere with it.  The UX definitely has the smell of vibe-coding -- basically attractive but undesigned; unintended for humans.  Seems like the kind of thing I'd enjoy... I just can't tell.

UI all unreadably tiny and no way to scale it.  Sepia-on-brown text is a difficult usability choice.  Behavior of startup menu is strange.

This is quite nice but it needs at least one more degree of complexity.  As it is you learn a good sequence once and then that will work equally well on every map.  Maybe add a layer of adjacency effects

* Front-end notes:

The counter for how many messages remain in my account does not update as I use them in the game, only when I change the page to another view or switch to another tab.

I scrolled way back in the text to find something; when I scrolled forward again a bunch of the most recent exchanges no longer appeared.

* Maybe combination front-end and LLM:

There's confusion in the Companions, NPCs and Inventory lists.  Companions had been empty but at some point about half the NPCs got transferred into Companions even though I haven't been able to form a party yet.  One character has generated listings for both "Commander Thorne" and a sepaarate one for "Thorne" -- and the first stayed in NPCs while the second switched to Companions.  Then there's all the random-word, object, and placename NPCs.

My Inventory contains an important pebble that I found and a poultice made of herbs I gathered.  That's right, but it also refuses to contain an evil figurine I found, even though I've picked it up twice and successfully transferred it into a separate pouch.  The system knows I have it but won't include it in Inventory.

* LLM trouble:

All sorts of weirdness as you might expect; I don't know how much you can correct it.  Another NPC problem is that one character appeared saying at first that her name was unimportant but later was described with the name of the village elder's dead granddaughter.  He has not recognized her, so I assume it's not meant to be the same person.  But there was something like "Elara says 'Elara's journals contain vital information.'"

I did get some XP for a non-combat act (unexpectedly), so that's at least partly working.  I *felt* like I should get some for a couple of other actions but I guess the system thought otherwise.  Maybe I had not completed them; hard to know.

* Otherwise:

Otherwise, my first run is interesting but confusing, maybe because I started it with no Narrative information.  I have a strong impression that it's making up all the action as it goes along, rather than maintaining a world that I'm acting in.  I've started a second and loaded it with Discworld (https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/), and it's doing quite well at Pratchett-like prose and setting.  So far this world seems more solid.  I started this one with D&D rules; so far I don't notice much difference.

Oh yeah; a couple of further thoughts.  After I was unexpectedly revived with half health and ran away from the wolves I tried doing First Aid on myself.  First attempt failed and I lost 3HP.  I had not been told I was bleeding out or anything, so I suspect that if I hadn't tried the First Aid I would not have lost those hit points.  Second attempt succeeded but I didn't get any HP back -- so was there any change in my status?  I said I was going to rest, so the system said I sat down but I did not sleep or heal; I had to get pretty specific about doing a Long Rest and then I slept and healed.  It's a little tricky knowing how to specify what RPG-mechanic thing you want to do, since there's no menu of specific actions to choose.

Also I haven't gotten very far in this yet but the only thing I've gotten XP for is fighting unsuccessfully with the wolves.  Maybe GURPS doesn't do things this way (it's a long time since I read the GURPS system, and I never played it) but I like it when slaughtering things isn't the only way to get experience.  Exploring, finding places and things, practicing skills, even some conversations could all give XP.  Although it's obviously tricky figuring out how to balance that right.

I can imagine that all of this might be tough to get an LLM to cooperate on.

The "Session not found" problem is not happening the same way now, but the banner appears on the itch.io version and looks like this:

As you can see it blocks the top menu (and never goes away).  Anyway, apparently my session *does* get found now, so... whatever.  Maybe it was some kind of cross-server issue, and now I've got all the right cookies in, or something.  (And now I'm playing on replit.app so no more of those issues.)

Yes, I meant to mention that it seemed like the threat level is pretty high for a little level-1 guy such as myself.  First encounter was with some dark sorcerer type who was clearly over my head, so I was polite and he went away.  But he (maybe) had already started a forest fire that destroyed my village before I met anyone there, and while escaping that I ran into two wolves I couldn't handle, and now we seem to be involved in some kind of Dark Forces emerging to take over the world.  When really I should just be beating up tavern basement rats or something.

Graphics -- nice but not necessary, IMO; maybe for later.  I think for now it'd be best to see how far you can get with making the AI do what you want.  Personally what I'd like more than graphics would be a map -- but that might be a lot more complicated.

Yeah, that last page of character creation is super powerful!  I get the idea of it and how it should work, but it's really a brand-new type of mechanic for games and it'll take me a while to figure out how to use it best.

A couple of years ago I tried making ChatGPT do a basic version of this and it was pretty bad.  Decent at DMing locations and encounters but no object permanence, no memory of things that had happened, the reality was all very squishy.  What you've got here is working much better than that.  Great project.

Turns out the Itch editor gets upset if you paste in screenshots -- and fails with a too-subtle alert.  You have to go through the image import.

Reposting.  Long story shorter, this seems like a really good start.  Dice rolls seem to happen when they should and to work right.  Narrative pretty good.  Some problems, some of which are probably more front-end and some more LLM; I don't know how fixable the latter might be.

In character creation I picked Heroic Realism and Elf Ranger; then in Stats my Core Attributes all started as 10s, as I'd expect for a human -- no adjustment for race (or profession, if that's a thing in GURPS).  The Narrative part is great but daunting; might be nice to have a few readymades for appearance and backstory as you have that one for world.  

In play there seems to be no notion of Equipment.  I had set up with my wealth as normal but I started with no gold, and the system couldn't say anything about what I was wearing -- where is my armor?  Got in a fight with two wolves; I said "Shoot the first wolf" and from somewhere I pulled out a bow and nocked an arrow.  Then we were close in so I asserted a sword and there it was.  How much other equipment could I assert into existence?

I did poorly  with the wolves, and it ended like this:

HP 0 and Combat: defeat make sense, but why the XP and how Revived?  No new clue was given and I asked "Where am I?"  I found myself in the same place with half my HP, still upright and still facing the wolves.  I ran away.

In my village (immediately burned down by Dark Forces) there was one useful character named Get.  I thought that was a funny name, but whatever.  Later though I looked at the NPC list, which showed this:

Somehow it's picking up verbs and designating them as NPCs -- which I guess includes Get even though I only used that word long before meeting her.  Also Sunken Fen and Whisperwood are places, and Elara was killed before I encountered her.  Bram is legit and the one not shown is a legitimate enemy.

The banner that says "For the best experience,open MyFable in a new tab" goes to a black page with a twirler and then says "Session not found".

All that said, this seems really promising!  Hope you can solve these things.

Oh dammit -- I put a long post in here earlier but now it seems not posted.  Did you see it?

From here it looks like I'm registered...

It's cute, but if I'm making H2O by dragging *one* H2 and one O2 to the flask there's a basic educational failure here.

Coming through itch.io using Brave on Ubuntu 22.4.

I use the "already have an account" link, get a login screen, (wrong pwd properly challenges again), that goes to this:

which looks like a repeat of first page.  From this point following the "sign in" path again just loops through this page; clicking "Begin Adventure" goes to sadface "refused to connect".

Looking good!  Two typos:

"strength and maximum"

"that has"

But now, having verified myself and trying to sign in, 

No, it was the game link not sent, and it didn't go to trash, it just didn't show up for a couple hours.  Anyway, it's there now.

Link not sent.

Doesn't work (Brave on Ubuntu).  Characters or Play buttons both go to a water background, no controls, banner "No saved characters. Create a new one!"  No way to proceed from there.

Pretty soon after getting started I had the UI looking like this:

So there's giant labels all over, some concealing content.  When I (Clemclone) click the mouse I jump and do something, but I can't tell what because I jump *under* my own label.  Cursor is the crosshair but there's a faint line stretching from it to somewhere below my feet.  Glitchy horizontal lines all over everything.  Interface widgets all much too small and their text is miniscule -- and this is after I maxed out the font size... but that only applied to the labels, I think.  And then the settings window said I could do O or ESC to close it so I tried ESC... which at least at itch.io pops you out of fullscreen, causing a reshuffle of UI widgets, leaving the settings window halfway offscreen and I couldn't figure out any way to get it back.

So this could be great but it's still a little rough.

Oho!  I didn't even notice your own site was a thing.  Aaaand... we have green!  Okay then; well done.

I noticed a couple of green CONNECTED flickers on the desktop (which does have its VPN on) but it went back to red; nothing in the console.  Laptop still just red.

Shields down; turns out the laptop didn't have its VPN on after all (dur); Console only shows this, continued indefinitely:

Hm.  Still no joy.  Both laptop and desktop, both using Brave in Ubuntu 22.04, coming through two different servers of the same VPN.

And yet...

Very cool, inside-out kind of idea, only it's not exactly a game because I couldn't figure out any way to do it *wrong*.